Scarlet and Hyssop Part 4

"Close on eleven."

"Then I must really be moving, Mildred. But Jack will play; he isn't coming on with me."

"Where are you going, Lady Alston?" asked Arthur.

"To see Blanche Devereux."

Arthur Naseby's face fell.

"I never knew she was giving a party," he said.

Marie laughed, rising.

"She isn't; don't be frightened; it is still possible that she has not dropped you, like Mildred. I'm only going to see her about the soldiers'

bazaar. In fact, it is because she isn't giving a party that I am going."

Jim Spencer got up too.

"Will you give me a lift?" he asked. "I am going to Eaton Place also."

"Certainly. Good-night, Mildred. Yes, I know my carriage is here. They told me half an hour ago. Jack is stopping to play, I suppose. Please tell him I have taken the carriage."

The two went out, and Mrs. Brereton and Naseby stood still looking at them. When they had disappeared they looked at each other.

"Dear Marie!" said that lady effusively, "how delighted she evidently is to see Jim Spencer again! Oh, dear, yes, they were very great friends in the old days, very great friends indeed. Come, Arthur, they are waiting for us."

"You always have such delightful people at your house," said Arthur, "and you always have something interesting to say about them. And that stiff young man is very rich, is he not?"

"Beyond the dreams," said Mrs. Brereton. "I wonder whom he will find to make his money fly for him?"

"One can never tell. He looks to me as if he might spend it on Corots or charity or something of that imperishable kind. Doesn't it strike you as odd that whereas the perishable nature of money is always dinned into one, yet one can apparently purchase imperishable treasure by being charitable with it? No, I can't imagine any one making his money fly.

Some one might make it march away, very solemnly and in good order, but not fly. He is a little stiff, is he not?"

"Perhaps a little reserved. But when reserve breaks down, it is so _very_ unreserved. I like seeing a reserved person having a real holiday."

"How many days would you say it was to the holidays?" asked Arthur, in a low voice, as they reached the card-table where Jack and another were waiting.

"I can't tell. I shouldn't wonder--no, I can't tell."

Marie and Jim Spencer meantime were driving down from Grosvenor Square towards the Park. The night was warm, and hosts of stars burned very large and luminous in a sky that was beyond the usual London measure of clearness. After the heat of the rooms, in particular after a certain feverishness of atmosphere, not physical so much as moral, a sense of extreme hurry and pressure, the night air and the cool steadiness of the stars were refreshing, not only physically but morally. Perhaps from their years of early companionship and intimacy, perhaps from a certain more deeply seated sympathy of mind, each was very conscious of the thoughts of the other, and the swift silent motion through the glare of the streets seemed to isolate them from the world. It was with something of this in her mind that Lady Alston spoke to the other.

"Yes, put down my window, Jim," she said, "and your own, too, if you are not afraid of catching cold. We are both outdoor people, I think."

"We used to be," said he.

"Do you mean you have changed? Or do you find I have?"

"I find you have. But I am quite willing to believe that it may be some change in myself that makes me think so."

Marie unwound the light shawl which she had thrown over her head, and undid the fastening of her gold-thread cloak, so as to let the air play on her uncovered neck. In another woman, he felt, this might have indicated some suspicion of coquetry, but he did her the justice to feel that no such imputation was possible.

"No, if you feel that you are probably right," she said, "for you do not seem to me to have changed at all. We both agree, in fact, about you.

There remains then me. How have I changed?"

He looked at her in the dusk of the carriage for a moment without replying.

"You seemed so much in harmony with those people," he said. "I felt that you felt yourself to be one of them. But I, obviously, I am afraid, felt that I was not. That is how I think you have changed; in the old days you would have appeared to yourself as alien to them as I do."

She gave him one glance.

"Ah, the old days!" she said with some impatience. "It is absurd and ridiculous to want to remain as one was. Indeed, not to change shows that one has a nature incapable of development. It implies a sort of moral torpor, an atrophy of one's nature not to get older as one gets older. And one of the biggest, and perhaps best effects of age is to give one tolerance, to make one realize that it takes all sorts to make a world."

He laughed.

"Why this sudden vehemence?" he asked.

"Oh, for a variety of reasons! One is because you judge me correctly, another because you judge me incorrectly. You are perfectly right to say that I have changed, but perfectly wrong to imply, even tacitly, that one is the worse for changing. And you do me the grossest injustice when you suppose that I am in harmony with those people. I am not any more than I ever was. But it is absurd to coil one's self up like a hedgehog, and run your spines into everything you come across. As a matter of fact I often do, but it is a mistake."

They drove on some way in silence. At last she spoke again.

"Many of the people with whom I appear to you to be in harmony I consider wicked," she said; "and many of them, I am sure, are vulgar in the largest sense of that wonderful term. England is a plutocracy, let me tell you, Jim. It worships wealth. It will certainly worship you. How will you like it? It will really be very interesting to see how you behave. It is an awful position for you: if you refuse to smile on your worshippers, they will write you down a miser; if you do smile on them, you will make yourself as vulgar as they."

He laughed.

"You frighten me," he said. "Is there no place in London for a quiet millionaire?"

She leaned forward with a sudden eagerness.

"Ah, Jim, make one, make one!" she said. "That is the root of the matter. Try if you can spend your money without encouraging either vice or vulgarity. It is worth an effort."

She leaned back again, laughing lightly, and drew her cloak round her again.

"Dear me, I have been vehement," she said; "but don't be afraid; I will treat you to no more outbursts. Only this afternoon my husband told me how absurd they were."

"Well, reserve them for me," he said; "I rather like them. You are an inspiring person, Marie. You know I always found you inspiring."

"Many thanks. But no inspiration will make any one do anything. One's motive has to come from within, not without, if it is worth anything."

"I am not so sure of that."

They stopped at Lady Devereux's house in Eaton Place, and until the bell was answered sat silent. Then, as the footman opened the carriage-door, "I am delighted you have come back, Jim," she said--"I really am delighted. Come and see me often. Come to lunch to-morrow, for instance.

Yes! That is right. Thirty-one, you know, and lunch at one-thirty."

CHAPTER III